iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 06/08/2026

How is it underrated, it has 23 likes, that's pretty huge I think

Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 01/07/2026

If it's any comfort, it's not personal, I'm using a blocklist that auto-blocks everybody that's following 5K+ accounts – and my posts are 99% Norwegian anyway, so you aren't missing much.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 29/06/2026

Hmm, no, pretty sure there's no way to do that.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 29/05/2026

A botmaker CAN instruct a bot to craft custom responses based on the content of a reply, but NOT in the way an LLM would do it, you can't tell these bots to "disregard previous instructions" or "criticize Israel" or "make me a sandwich" and expect the bot to understand what to do with those words.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 29/05/2026

Yeah, this is probably a good time to remind everyone that: - BBDQ does not use GenAI/LLMs - Bots created with BBDQ does not use GenAI/LLMs - BBDQ will never use GenAI/LLMs - Bots created with BBDQ will never use GenAI/LLMs - Most BBDQ bot replies don't actually READ replies, they return random text

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Reposted by Blue Bots, Done Quick!

Cat Manning @catacalypto.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

so first, lol, but second, I do think it’s interesting how some people’s only conception of a bot is an LLM- or NN-driven conversation-shaped thing as opposed to something shaped by its creator into a genuine creative artifact

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 06/04/2026

If the issue is fetching images from a specific server that you don't own, the most logical explanation would be that the server does not wish for its images to be used by bots in this way, and the only solution to that is hosting your images elsewhere

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 05/04/2026

Ugh, that's horrible... Sorry, I have no idea how that could have happened, can't immediately think of anything on my end that could have caused it.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 03/04/2026

Turns out that sometimes things fix themselves while you're watching The Pitt and eating oreo cake Instead of always asking "have you tried turning it off and on again" we should get better at asking "have you tried watching The Pitt and eating oreo cake"

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 03/04/2026

Server's not responding, restarting it doesn't really work, can't do much about it atm, will reattempt later

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 06/03/2026

Hmm, no, those wouldn't be too hard to add but I had no idea they existed - I don't think those were in the tracery parser I converted from CBDQ. Supported modifiers are replace, capitalize, capitalizeAll, a, s, firstS, and ed.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 15/02/2026

Everything's still one database and one table, but instead of selecting every bit that needs posting I use modulo and only select rows WHERE id % (x) = (y) where x and y are shell arguments, so that I can set up x cron jobs and pass different y arguments to them to target different sections of db.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 01/02/2026

Ah, I saw this commit github.com/v21/traceryh..., but looking closer at it I see that it was because of the Twitter API changes, and only two months before CBDQ shut down

github.com

update for new API changes - replies read only, label 10 as 30, note … · v21/traceryhosting-frontend@b0fdb5c

…on homepage

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 01/02/2026

Hmm, looking at your repos, am I correct that you originally had a ten minute interval but you changed the minimum to thirty later? Any reason you did that? (If I did the same, it would reduce the number of total posts by a third...)

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 30/01/2026

Ugh, thanks, fixed it now. Had some changes on a git branch I assumed was on a different branch, so when I tried fixing a bunch of stuff a few days, that overwrote the last handful of changes to that file.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 29/01/2026

Update: I think I found a way to solve this. Basically I'm now splitting the database in five parts and running five smaller cron jobs instead of one big one. I didn't expect that change to have a huge effect, but it works surprisingly well so far.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 28/01/2026

Okay, I think all bots are running as normal again now. And I *hope* the server won't crash as a result of that. Let's keep it running all night and find out!

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 28/01/2026

(I sincerely hope that when you say that you supported via Patreon, you don't mean that you were actually charged money for that, because my records show zero paying patrons and I've been assuming that Patreon has been truthful about that.)

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 28/01/2026

... yeah, okay, that's not really an acceptable fix. A quick calculation of my own hourly bot's performance for the past 19 hours reveals that it has posted on average once every 137 minutes. Which is... very much more than sixty. Thanks for your patience while I ponder on the best way to fix this.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 28/01/2026

I guess one way to do it could be allowing replies, but only checking for replies once or twice an hour instead of every five minutes.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 28/01/2026

Sure, this is still a hypothetical, and the best case scenario would still be to not have to add these restrictions at all.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 27/01/2026

I'm on PHP, no Node installed. I've had multiple cron jobs running at the same time until now, and most of the time that works okay, but yeah, it takes tons of memory and has caused quite a few server crashes by now, so I would prefer keeping the concurrency as low as possible.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 27/01/2026

I'm experimenting with small changes to the script that publishes your posts to Bluesky to reduce future crashes. At the moment, a side effect of said experimenting is that quite a few bots will post less frequently than usual. Hopefully, this is only temporary until I come up with something better.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 27/01/2026

(Until now I have been running multiple cron jobs at the same time, always starting a new job every five minutes regardless of whether the last job was finished or not. I changed that now so that all jobs terminate after five minutes, which helps server load, but that way not all bots will post...)

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 27/01/2026

That's the bottleneck, yeah. Have spent the evening testing, tweaking and measuring, and it looks like the tracery and database updates take virtually no time at all, but on average a bot takes >4 seconds to authenticate and 6.5 seconds to post, basically setting a cap at ~360 posts an hour...

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 27/01/2026

Oooh, I definitely wanna chat performance stuff, I seriously don't know what I'm doing here, so any advice you can give on improvements is strongly appreciated.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 27/01/2026

Okay so far the response to this post has been overwhelmingly positive, and I refuse to believe that is actually representative, please someone tell me you hate it too before I spend way too much time implementing it just to watch it crash and burn on launch 🙈

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 27/01/2026

It feels like a nuclear option because it, by design, would kill off or neuter a ton of great bots, but it would definitely make the remaining bots run smoother. BBDQ bots are now posting to bluesky ~1400-1500 times/hour, not including replies. Reducing that number by 80-90 % would help me A LOT.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 27/01/2026

Also kinda wondering and a little afraid to ask, but another hypothetical... If BBDQ bots by default were restricted to only post 4 times a day and don't read replies, and anything above that was a paid option (say, $1/month with quantum discounts), would ANYONE be okay with that?

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 26/01/2026

There are literally a hundred times more bots on there than I originally expected, and I love each and every one of you, but I kinda want to work on other projects too, and that's considerably harder when one project keeps crashing the server because it is posting to bluesky on behalf of 1000+ bots

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 26/01/2026

A kinda hypothetical question, asked out of curiosity: If I were unable to keep hosting BBDQ, would anyone be willing to take it over and keep it running in my place, assuming I handed you all the code and told you exactly how to use it? It's kinda gotten way too big for my server to handle 😩

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 17/01/2026

I appreciate the thought, but honestly I'll probably remove the Patreon link the next time I get around to updating the code. Patreon works well for some people, but this not the type of projects that normally make money on there, at least not enough money to actually make a real difference.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 11/01/2026

(Of course, one QUICK solution to this issue would probably be to drastically reduce the number of active bots by adding a paywall... But I can't imagine that would be a very popular solution. I probably wouldn't be too comfortable charging for this anyway, since the whole idea is stolen from CBDQ.)

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 11/01/2026

There may be some bad code involved here, I am an amateur hobbyist after all, but I have no idea where... Increasing server memory could work and I'm considering it, but it would cost me money - and I don't know *how long* that would be an effective solution if the number of bots keep growing.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 11/01/2026

The reason BBDQ (and everything else on my server) occasionally goes down, is that the site was never scaled for running 1100+ bots, so occasionally it runs out of memory and stops working until I restart the server. For now, I don't really have a clever solution to this problem, sorry.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 26/11/2025

Yes, Tracery has a modifier for this (and since it's in Tracery, it should work on toot sweet too). Instead of "I ate a #nut#", write "I ate #nut.a#". That's all. Depending on the value of nut, that will automatically return "I ate a walnut" or "I ate an almond".

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 31/10/2025

Correct. If I recall correctly I'm polling xrpc/app.bsky.notification.listNotifications . I didn't think that should cause that kind of issue, but I haven't checked it.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 25/10/2025

How nuts? The server was down for 11 hours or something (I was told) so I restarted it an hour ago and it always acts up a little at first when I do that...

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 14/10/2025

Going to bed now, will have a look at it tomorrow

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 01/09/2025

So the Bsky app decided to not send me notifications about this mention OR the eight other mentions saying the same thing, so I didn't see it until now ... Server restarted, bots should start running again soon. No idea what the issue is, but will investigate, this is the second time it's happened

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 23/08/2025

I'm aware of the issue and not sure how to fix it, but it has *something* to do with the syntax highlighting, so one way to get rid of the issue is to click the cog icon and turn syntax highlighting off. Which obviously has its own cons...

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 15/08/2025

The main channel for posting issues or new feature ideas is my GitHub, github.com/olafmoriarty..., but you're free to post them here, too. In general, I *love* feature requests. Bugs and outages do happen. Not TOO often, though. If you have any questions at all about BBDQ, feel free to ask!

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 15/08/2025

*700 followers*? Wow! Hello everybody! BBDQ is a tool allowing you to easily build your own Tracery-based Bluesky bot, coding it manually or using an editor. The entire process contains zero generative AI. The site is continuously being developed, and new functionality is always around the corner.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 01/08/2025

After a period of downtime, there are a lot of skeets queued up for posting, so it takes some time for the script to get around to posting all of them, and it started with the higher interval bots, so it hasn't gotten to the hourly bots yet.

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Blue Bots, Done Quick! @bluebotsdonequick.com · 01/08/2025

Hmm, looks like my server has been down for a few hours. Should be up again now, and it looks like your bots are functional again.

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